AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL LIES YET AGAIN
By now it should be clear that the Middle Eastern media is as corrupted and biased as that of the West and spreads Zionist and Western translations of events, both real and imagined, to work for their eventual goal, to rouse up the populaces to the state of war. Consider the boondoggle they made of Libya and how swiftly the truth was outed!
They had crazy Iraqi soldiers throwing premies out of their incubators to rouse the populace ~ exposed many times as a blatant lie, AFTER the fact and the damage was done. Barbarize the target nation to arouse international anger. Remember who funds AI. Yes there are donors, but the big funders are "do gooders" like George Soros.
The truth? Not very bloody likely.
By
Franklin Lamb,
October 31, 2011
EN ROUTE TO NIGER
This observer counts
himself among Amnesty International’s more than 3 million supporters and
members in more than 150 countries and territories who also strongly endorse
AI’s campaigns to end grave abuses of human rights. I share AI’s vision for
every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and other international human rights standards.
In Beirut, I attend their
events and was honored to play a small part in assisting with last spring’s AI
research on the subject of disappeared Palestinians and Lebanese which resulted
in AI’s excellent April, 2011 publication: Never Forgotten: Lebanon’s Missing People. This
report documents one of the bitter legacies of the 1975-1990 civil wars which
is the thousands of people whose fates remain unknown.
I have crossed paths with
AI researchers in the Middle East and recently during three months in Libya I
followed their work which included the human rights problems of black Libyans,
particularly from the Tabatha region but also in eastern and western Libya
where blacks were often taken from hospitals never to be seen again.
AI rightly condemned the
number of massacres and extra-judicial killings perpetrated by both pro-Gaddafi
and NTC partisans, many of which, like the 53 recently executed Gaddafi
supporters found at the Mohair Hotel in Sire involved the kidnapping and murder
of patients in hospitals.
These grisly scenes have
shocked the world’s conscience and all people of goodwill condemn them.
They weaken substantially
the moral authority of the group currently claiming power in Libya.
Despite its generally
exemplary work, Amnesty International, like the rest of us, is not infallible.
ED: Not when their values
are compromised from the highest levels as has been discussed in this blog
before.
This is evident in its
10/25/11 released 39 page report: Health Crisis: Syrian Government Targets the
Wounded and Health Workers.
AI’s conclusion from its
“research” in Syria, which consisted significantly of collecting Al Jazeera and
Al Arabia type media accounts including the dubious reports on the same subject
by CNN’s Arwa Damon and sundry anonymous you-tube clips is, interestingly,
virtually identical to what it concluded from its investigation in Libya on the
same subject.
ED: The above listed
publications were media outlets for NATO and far from impartial observers.
Indeed most of the worst propaganda against Qadaffi was released via these Zionist mouthpieces to
the Middle East. Think ABC, NBC, Fox, CNN, etc.
However, there is a great
distinction between Syria and Libya, their medical professions and their
current challenges.
AI claims this week, without convincing material, probative or relevant evidence that
Syrian authorities, including Hospital administrators and staff, have since
March 2011 turned Syrian hospital into instruments of repression in order to
crush protests and demonstrations. AI’s j report claims that:
Syrians wounded in protests or incidents related to the current unrest “have been physically assaulted in state-run hospitals by medical staff, and in some cases denied medical care, while others taken to hospital have been detained or have simply disappeared.”
AI offers as its proof of
these claims the weakest and seemingly most competition-driven support of any
Amnesty International report I have read. It reeks of yet another Orientalist
double standard and ignores similar claims from citizens in western countries
of similar actions by their governments.
This observer recently
had the opportunity to visit with administrators and medical staff at Syria’s
largest state-run Ministry of Health hospital (Syria also has Higher Education
Hospitals for university students and Ministry of Defense Hospitals, the latter
being roughly equivalent to American Veterans Hospitals forth military,)which
is Damascus General Hospital, established in 1952.
Damascus Hospital sees
800 patients daily and is one of 90 hospitals belonging to the Ministry of
Hearth that together serve all of Syria with 14, 571 beds.
Medical care in Syria is
virtually free.
Among those I had the
opportunity to meet with recently and to discuss issues raised by Amnesty
International were Dr. Mahmoud Naji (damahosp@mail.sy) who is the Director of
the Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit at Damascus Hospital and Dr.
Adib Mahmoud, (damahosp@mail.sy), Damascus Hospital administrator.
Dr. Mahmoud Naji
Both the Syria Medical
Emergency Association, of which Dr.Naji is a representative and the Syrian
Medical Association, has large memberships with the reputation of being
fiercely independent of and resistant to outside influences. At the same time
they have achieved individual treatment and medical ethics standards that help
make Syria’s medical services the highest rated in the Middle East.
Amnesty qualifies its
findings with complaints that it did not have access to Syrian hospital staff,
and that it wanted to protect its “witnesses” by withholding some specifics
such as time, place, and circumstances of alleged wrongdoing by members the
Syrian medical community, as well as the unwillingness of alleged victims of
abuse to come forward.
Damascus Public Hosptial founded in 1953
For their part, Syrian
medical staff complained to this observer that AI’s Report is deeply flawed and
that in fact Syrian hospitals welcome foreign visitors for tours and dialogue
with all questions honestly addressed.
Syria’s medical
profession has justifiably taken umbrage at what it considers, as one Physician
described,
“Amnesty International’s
“gratuitous defamation of Syria’s medical community.”
According to Amnesty’s
report, but without providing convincing collaborative evidence, wounded
patients in at least four government-run hospitals had been subjected to
torture and other ill-treatment, both by medical workers and security
personnel.
AI’s charges that Syrian medical staff humiliate or refuse to treat patients brought laughter from some care givers at Damascus Hospital, as they explained the strict procedure they abide by from the moment a patient arrives at the emergency entrance.“We treat each patient to the best of our ability and we are strictly forbidden from questioning them about the circumstances of their injury,” Dr. Mahmoud Naji explained.
Syria’s Al Mouwasat public hospital founded in 1946 and free to all.
1946 was the same year US President Harry Truman promised to “take on
that mean trust-the American Medical Association” and enact free health
care for all Americans. 64 years later the gap between Syria and the US
in terms of civilized and affordable medical care for its citizens is
vast.
This observer was invited
to literally follow arriving emergency room patients as they were admitted and
treated and until they were assigned a bed in the appropriate ward.
A nurse, who was filling
out a patient’s medical forms noted,
“In certain cases if there was an auto accident, for example, and an injured person arrives while the accident is being investigated then we could contact authorities. However, our patient privacy rules are very strict in Syria and we can only ask medical and certainly not political questions, according to one ER intern as she took the blood pressure of an arriving young woman who complained of stomach cramps.
A Physician who had
trained at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston explained,
“I am sure there must be some abuse and especially in the middle of an area where there is fighting, but I have personally never heard of any physician or medical personnel doing what some Western media have alleged without submitting proof. Do police officers sometimes come to the hospital? Yes but it’s like what you would see, for example, in America on a week-end night at the emergency room in maybe the 200 largest cities., isn’t it?When I was training in Boston and with all that goes on in the early hours of the morning in big cities, one sees more police cars outside emergency rooms than ambulances. While it’s not like that here, the police presumably sometimes have reason to suspect that a crime may have been committed and the arriving injured person might be the victim or the perpetrator and an officer has the duty to complete a police report. I believe it’s similar anywhere.”
Another Dr. commented,
“And yes, our medical profession has been criticized along with our government because it is claimed by some that some injured people may not want to come to our hospital thinking we might report them to the police. We will not. Does that not also happen in every society? Someone is injured while doing something wrong or criminal and they are afraid of being arrested so they seek alternative treatment from friends or private clinics. Yes, that sometimes happens in our country. Every citizen can choose where they seek treatment.”
Syria’s hospital staff, some shown at Al Mouwasat public hospital said
they would welcome anyone who wants to discuss what they claim are
fabrications in the AI “investigation” Report and to visit with patients
and medical staff in order to make their own judgments.
According to Syria’s
Ministry of Health, it has not received any complaint to date, either from the patients
nor from their relatives about any maltreatment or encroachment, In it’s just
released report: Health Crisis: The Syrian Government Targets the Wounded and Health Workers,” Amnesty International falls far below an objective standard
and fails to shoulder its burden of proof for the charges it levels at Syria’s
medical community.
AI also fails to meet the
standard of investigative work that we who support and endorse its existence
and work expect.
Franklin Lamb is doing
research in Libya. He is reachable c\o fplamb@gmail.com He is the author of The
Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons against
Civilians in Lebanon.
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